I got these awesome photos from Paul Karner of Bangor, who seems like he has his hand in just about everything these days. Some of you may remember Paul from past articles about his raptor banding station atop the Blue Mountain or the hundreds of kesterel, bluebird and tree swallow nest boxes he erects and monitors across northern Northampton County.

Now, since he apparently has so much free time (NOT!), Paul has decided to start raising monarch butterflies and tagging them for research purposes in cooperation with the Monarch Watch (http://www.monarchwatch.com/) program run by the University of Kansas.

Paul said he collects monarch eggs from milkweed plants in the wild and hatches the caterpillars in a fish tank at his house. After the caterpillars go into their chrysalis, he transfers them to a clear tank where he can monitor their progress and then tags and releases the adult butterflies.

"It's be a great experience for me and my family," Paul said.

Paul said he ordered 50 tags from Monarch Watch, which uses the tags to monitor monarch migration. In case you didn't know, monarchs migrate all the way down to Mexico for the winter and will head back north as far as Texas in the spring before the current generation mates and dies out. The monarchs that come back up to the Lehigh Valley next spring could be descendants of the ones Paul is hatching in his house at Bangor right now.

Here's the series of photos showing the caterpillar, chrysalis and adult. The last photo shows Paul's daughter Danielle and her friend Chereen releasing an adult.